All Things Go Podcast

How Travis Found Go

[00:00] Travis: I got into Go over a multi year period and it was very much in fits and starts. I first learned about the game through the documentary AlphaGo. Before the pandemic, it very much caught my interest.

[00:12] Travis: And then during the pandemic I had that really unique confluence of events where I was working home remotely, but also my wife and I had our son who was born right at the beginning of it.

[00:24] Travis: And so I had this very unique opportunity to scratch that itch and learn more about the game. And it was amazing how I, as I started learning the rules, the terms in Japanese and as I started to try to play against the computer on my iPad, I would lose very badly.

[00:39] Travis: I just wasn’t getting it. And the fact that I was so bad at it really stuck with me. It was very interesting to feel like I couldn’t understand it. Why is that?

[00:49] Travis: And it really pushed me to want to keep learning about it and keep trying to understand it. And that’s very much the allure of Go for me. It’s this mystique to the game as I saw from the AlphaGo documentary, but I’ve also seen references to it in movies about samurai and things like that.

[01:06] Travis: And so for a good two years I only did tsumego, I did problems. I’d read books about it and I would only at the end of that two year period actually play any games.

[01:16] Travis: It was so interesting how I would just get stuck in that world of reading about it and learning about it. And yet I was actually pretty hooked into Go before I even got a tutor and started playing humans.

[01:28] Travis: Mainly because of the inherent complexity and nuance and subtlety of the game. It just felt like a new language that was completely visual and something to which I was a complete newcomer.

[01:40] Travis: And it was refreshing to get this opportunity to learn about something like this. So fast forward to today. I’ve been playing for a few years and I am obsessed. And in my day to day I commute, I do errands around the house, I do errands to go get groceries and I love podcasts and they’re just wasn’t anything out there on Go in a audio only format.

[02:03] Travis: There were things I could listen to that were also visual on YouTube,

[02:08] Travis: but that would be challenging because I’d have to refer to something that was on the video and if I was driving, that’s dangerous, so I can’t do that.

[02:16] Travis: So this is what got me to thinking over and over, over again, gosh, there should be something out there about Go. I saw that on podcasts. There was a lot about chess, so why not about Go?

[02:26] Travis: And I invariably got to the decision that if you want something so bad, you have to it yourself.

[02:32] Travis: So here we are. This is all Things Go.

About All Things Go

[02:54] Travis: First, a little bit about me. My name is Travis and I’m a 10 kyu on the Online Go Server, OGS. I have experience teaching. I actually was able to live in China for a time though unfortunately Go did not enter into that experience and I’ve been a financial planner now for quite a few years.

[03:11] Travis: The audience for this podcast is hopefully going to be everybody, so it should hold some interest for newcomers to the game as well as novices as well as advanced players,

[03:20] Travis: because the content that we’re going to focus on will be really anything and everything Go related.

[03:26] Travis: I’m going to do interviews with figures in the Go community, both in the US and hopefully abroad. We’re going to review books together, websites, movies, tv, TV shows. I’m going to do personal commentary on topics around Go that I just find fascinating and I think you would find fascinating too.

[03:42] Travis: And I’m also going to look at the online forums and see what people are talking about.

[03:46] Travis: Also going to look at key learning points on my journey in the world of Go. And it’s important to know what this podcast won’t be. It’s not going to be a technical review or of the visual aspects of the game, simply because that’s not terribly suitable for an audio format like a podcast.

[04:02] Travis: This game is an incredible one. It’s really hard to find that combination of difficulty, intrigue, nuance and fun all wrapped up into one thing, and I think Go really strikes that balance.

Introducing Frank Lantz

[04:17] Travis: So I said to myself, who would be best positioned to help describe the game of Go?

[04:22] Travis: How great it is, how interesting it is, and also put it in the context of the general gaming scene?

[04:29] Travis: Who better to do that than a game designer? So I was very lucky to get in touch with a gentleman named Frank Lantz. He’s a game designer with a focus on exploring emerging technology to create new kinds of gameplay.

[04:41] Travis: And I actually found out about him because he was featured in the documentary AlphaGo. I highly recommend it. I’ll put it in the episode notes. And he is actually the founding chair of the NYU Game center, and he has actually taught game design for over 20 years at New York University,

[04:58] Travis: Parsons School of Design and the School of Visual Arts and has created numerous influential talks and writings on the subject of games. He also has a book that just came out last year called the Beauty of Games, which was published by the MIT Press.

[05:10] Travis: And I Definitely recommend it. So take a listen to my conversation with Frank Lantz about the game of Go.

Games as an Art Form

[05:19] Travis: All right, well, let’s get started.

[05:21] Travis: Frank, thank you so much for being here.

[05:24] Frank Lantz: It’s my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

[05:27] Travis: Excellent. So let’s start with your work as a game designer and as a game design teacher.

[05:33] Travis: A key argument of your 2023 book, the Beauty of Games, is that games have almost become a form of art, and perhaps more accurately, something with an aesthetic quality, I believe, is what you describe it as.

[05:48] Travis: And so it’s something that we can lump in, perhaps, with things that make up culture with a capital C. So art,

[05:55] Travis: music,

[05:56] Travis: et cetera.

[05:57] Travis: How does Go fit into this concept as one of the oldest games that is still played today in its original form?

[06:05] Frank Lantz: My position is that games,

[06:08] Frank Lantz: it’s not that they’ve become something like an art form, it’s that they’ve always been something like an art form.

[06:14] Frank Lantz: Games even,

[06:15] Frank Lantz: you know, before video games, before computer games.

[06:19] Frank Lantz: So traditional games and sports, board games and strategy games and gambling games are really have always been best understood as cultural objects that are something similar to an art form.

[06:32] Frank Lantz: You know, there’s some activities we do in order to accomplish something.

[06:36] Frank Lantz: We wash our car, or we do the dishes,

[06:40] Frank Lantz: or we work on our car. Like we fix the engine of our car. We’re doing that in order to accomplish something in the world.

[06:45] Frank Lantz: And then there are certain things we do for their own sake. And so when we engage in art and we participate in aesthetic experiences like dancing or making music,

[06:56] Frank Lantz: that’s something we’re doing for its own sake. And it’s also something that is shared, right? It’s not just like a private thing that we’re doing,

[07:05] Frank Lantz: you know, for our own pleasure. It’s something that involves a kind of collaboration with other people collectively, we’re deciding,

[07:17] Frank Lantz: you know, which of these things we like and what’s good about them. When you’re. If you’re a critic, you know,

[07:22] Frank Lantz: writing about music and analyzing it,

[07:25] Frank Lantz: when you’re making music and thinking about what kind of album you want to make, what kind of song you want to make, what kind of performance you want to do, you know, you’re thinking about these issues of communication and connection with other people,

[07:37] Frank Lantz: about these deep values that have to do with these.

[07:40] Frank Lantz: The things that are captured and expressed by the particular type of intrinsic experience,

[07:46] Frank Lantz: the value and pleasure that you get from.

[07:49] Frank Lantz: From creating music, listening to music, dancing.

[07:52] Frank Lantz: And if you think about that whole set of ideas that make something an aesthetic form, make something an art form,

[07:59] Frank Lantz: it seems like, that’s the best way to understand games and sort of always has been.

[08:05] Frank Lantz: Yeah, you could say, okay, well, no, but games are just a hobby, right? Maybe you could say, oh, games are a pastime or a hobby. And, okay, I sort of see that argument.

[08:14] Frank Lantz: But you can sort of say, like, what’s a peculiar kind of hobby, isn’t it?

[08:19] Frank Lantz: You could say that working on your car is a hobby. But when you work on your car,

[08:22] Frank Lantz: you’re tuning it up and you’re getting something done, you’re accomplishing something. But maybe you can say, look, I just want to work on my car for its own sake. I’m not even fixing this car.

[08:30] Frank Lantz: I’m just doing it, you know, out of. For its intrinsic qualities. It makes me relaxed. I like the feeling of tinkering with an engine and making it run. I’m not even.

[08:38] Frank Lantz: I don’t even own a car. Maybe I just have this engine up on the blocks and I go and I work on it.

[08:43] Frank Lantz: And I would say, yeah, that’s kind of like an aesthetic experience you’re having.

[08:47] Frank Lantz: And to the degree that you do that,

[08:49] Frank Lantz: look, if it’s just your own private, personal thing that you do and you like a weird thing that you do for its own sake, then sure, then maybe that’s not very much like painting or poetry.

[08:59] Frank Lantz: But when you do it as part of a community of other people who are also doing it, and you’re arguing and debating about how it should be done, and you’re sharing that experience with other people,

[09:10] Frank Lantz: and you’re analyzing it and interpreting it and thinking about it, and then also kind of stepping back and applying it to.

[09:19] Frank Lantz: To your life and trying to extract larger meanings from it. And in that sense, I would just say, look, you’re doing something very much like participating in an art form,

[09:28] Frank Lantz: very much like what people do when they make movies or make music or make paintings. And it seems to me like, yeah, that’s very much what games are like, what games have always been like.

[09:37] Frank Lantz: And in fact, this particular image of you and your garage with an engine is a specifically good analysis because there is a sense in which games have always appealed to that particular kind of aesthetic.

[09:51] Frank Lantz: The machine aesthetic, the engineering mindset, the kind of person who’s into Go,

[09:56] Frank Lantz: the kind of person who’s into poker, the kind of person who’s into strategy games certainly is the kind of person who is drawn into problem solving and understanding complex systems and how they fit together and tuning them and tweaking them.

[10:10] Frank Lantz: And what happens if I do this? What happens? Like what are the consequences of these little changes? How do these things fit together?

[10:16] Frank Lantz: So to the degree that that is something that is done in participation with, with this kind of larger community of people who are also doing it and who genuinely find it beautiful and meaningful in their lives, you know, that they’re getting something profound out of it, then I would say,

[10:32] Frank Lantz: yeah, that’s. That’s what games are, and that’s what games always have been. I don’t want this to be like, like a mind blowing concept. I want it to be. To feel like a common sense thing that when you hear it, you’re like, oh, yeah, that makes sense.

[10:42] Frank Lantz: The term art is just confusing because people hear art and they think the Louvre, they think Mona Lisa, they think paintings and you know what I mean? Museums. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, no.

[10:52] Frank Lantz: Think Taylor Swift. Right.

[10:54] Frank Lantz: Lana Del Rey. Right, right. Think TV shows and cartoons. You know, think pop culture. Like,

[11:00] Frank Lantz: this is what we call. Like, it’s just a creative cultural form that people make stuff and share it and do it. And, you know,

[11:08] Frank Lantz: video games are like this because video games have stories and pictures and characters. It’s like, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yes. Video games have all those things. But that’s not the thing that makes them art.

[11:16] Travis: Sure.

[11:17] Frank Lantz: The thing that makes them art is the thing that has always been in games, which is that they are this weird hobby that people do for its own sake that has this deeper meaning.

[11:26] Frank Lantz: But it’s not. But it’s intrinsic, Right. It’s not. You’re not doing it in order to accomplish something in the world.

[11:31] Frank Lantz: You’re kind of wasting your time by doing this thing, but you’re doing it for its own sake. And there’s something about the experience itself that matters. Right. It’s not about what comes out of the experience.

[11:39] Frank Lantz: It’s not about what gets produced. It’s the experience itself. That’s what makes something an art form.

[11:44] Frank Lantz: I want people to, like, see this in a broader sense that, okay, this is what football is. This is what basketball is. This is what hockey is. This is what tic tac Toe is.

[11:56] Frank Lantz: This is what spin the Bottle is.

[11:59] Frank Lantz: This is what Truth or Dare is. This is what the $24, 000 pyramid is. Right. This is what Survivor is,

[12:08] Frank Lantz: and this is what Red Dead Redemption is and Assassin’s Creed and Go.

[12:13] Frank Lantz: And this is not that new of an idea in Chinese culture at a time, you know, when Go was like a really important part of understanding of what culture was,

[12:25] Frank Lantz: Go was considered one of the four arts of A cultivated Chinese gentleman apologize for the sexism. But at first time, this is what. How it was framed, how it was.

[12:36] Frank Lantz: And you would. You learned Go alongside learning the instrument, the guqin, and learning painting and, you know, learning calligraphy. Calligraphy, yeah. And other things like that. It’s like it was considered an art.

[12:47] Frank Lantz: And of course, like, of course it is, because, like, what else could it be? Like, it’s this weird activity that you do for its own sake, and it can genuinely have this kind of pleasure that we call beauty.

[12:57] Frank Lantz: Although its beauty is maybe sometimes hard to see because it’s not visual in an obvious way, right? You can’t point to it and say, oh, it’s beautiful because it’s symmetrical.

[13:05] Frank Lantz: It doesn’t have these formal qualities that you can point to easily because it is a dynamic system. It’s a system of rules that you enter into and participate in, and your own choices and actions, along with those of your opponent, create something.

[13:19] Frank Lantz: But in that sense, it is like music, but again, so music doesn’t have beauty that you can see, but it has beauty that you can hear.

[13:26] Frank Lantz: Well, Go has beauty that you can feel, right? It has beauty that you can experience.

[13:30] Frank Lantz: You. You experience the beauty in the tension between the rules and the consequences of those rules and your own choices and actions and how it all fits together.

[13:43] Frank Lantz: And it’s just. It’s harder to describe, you know, because it is this kind of ephemeral thing, right? This. We don’t have good language. Even though this is an ancient form of culture,

[13:54] Frank Lantz: we don’t really have great language for describing what it is about Go that makes it beautiful in this particular way, which is one of the reasons that I wrote my book.

Elegance, Emergence, and What Makes Go Great

[14:04] Travis: You actually did a lecture back in 2014 at the US Go Congress in New York,

[14:10] Travis: and it’s very well on display on YouTube. Actually. It was really nice for me to be able to go back to it and review some of the level of thinking that you really provided about Go.

[14:20] Travis: And you discussed what makes Go so compelling and powerful in its design,

[14:24] Travis: is how it highlights these concepts in game design of elegance and emergence. Can you just tell us a little bit more about why Go is such a great game? In the context of those two dimensions,

[14:38] Frank Lantz: it’s easy to look at something like Go and think if it is beautiful, right? If it does have these qualities that an art form has of being beautiful, they’re somehow hermetically sealed, like it’s somehow just about itself, like it’s purely abstract.

[14:51] Frank Lantz: And you do it and you plug into it and you get these feelings,

[14:55] Frank Lantz: sure, maybe. And maybe people, some people find them beautiful or meaningful,

[15:00] Frank Lantz: but they’re really self contained, you know what I mean? Like, you disappear into Go,

[15:04] Frank Lantz: and then maybe you come out afterwards and you’re like, oh, it was great. And other people, like, who cares? You know what I mean?

[15:09] Frank Lantz: Just like when you hear a beautiful symphony or you play a beautiful. You learn an instrument and you participate in the creation of a beautiful symphony, right? It’s not just that you’ve gone to a place and had this experience and now you’re back.

[15:24] Frank Lantz: No, the thing that you’re experiencing that is beautiful is always taking place in the context of your life and the world.

[15:32] Frank Lantz: So it’s ne. It’s never just like a totally isolated thing.

[15:36] Frank Lantz: In the case of Go, I think, yeah, this, this idea of simplicity and elegance is one, which is that there’s something mind blowing that we still haven’t quite wrapped our heads around about the way a handful of simple rules can produce this enormous possibility space.

[15:55] Frank Lantz: How simplicity can lead to complexity. This is such a deep idea. Like, this is Darwin’s great insight, right? Like, you look around at the world and you’re like, well, I guess there’s some kind of magical God.

[16:07] Frank Lantz: And then Darwin is like, no, actually there doesn’t need to be a magical God.

[16:12] Frank Lantz: Because if you think about it,

[16:14] Frank Lantz: you could just have stuff. You could just have rocks and dirt and eggs and trees.

[16:20] Frank Lantz: And like, if you think about how these things relate to each other, some things eat other things and then, you know, you have babies and stuff and it’s like, look, you could get feathers and eyes and claws and peacock tails out of the iteration of this simple set of rules.

[16:36] Frank Lantz: And Go is an artwork that is about that,

[16:41] Frank Lantz: right? Go is an investigation into a simple set of rules that produces like, an endless amount of complexity and depth and surprise.

[16:52] Frank Lantz: This idea of, of. Of elegance, which is how much stuff can you get rid of? How much stuff can you carve away and still have this.

[17:01] Frank Lantz: Have something that lights up, you know, that catches fire? It’s not that every set of rules does this.

[17:07] Frank Lantz: Most combinations of very, very simple rules just lie there on the table and they don’t become a beloved work of culture that lasts for centuries.

[17:16] Travis: I always take your word for that because as a game designer, right, you’re constantly trying to figure out, how do you make this actually interesting, right?

[17:22] Frank Lantz: Exactly. This is what game designers are always looking for. What are those little combinations of rules that catch fire and produce complexity in this really interesting way?

[17:31] Frank Lantz: And Go is the example of that Par excellence. I mean, it is the absolute best example if you’re familiar with the concept of cellular automata.

[17:41] Frank Lantz: Yeah. So John Conway, this famous mathematician, created this thing called the Game of Life, which is this wonderful demonstration of how you can have very, very simple iterative rules on a grid where you’re just determining whether each spot on a grid is filled in or is empty.

[17:59] Frank Lantz: And you just have a very simple set of rules about looking at the neighbors of that cell and whether they’re filled in or empty. And then you just iterate that one generation after the next,

[18:08] Frank Lantz: and you end up with all of these like, weird, bubbling, complicated, interesting patterns that almost look like,

[18:15] Frank Lantz: like a living organism or a little ecosystem.

[18:18] Frank Lantz: Most possible sets of rules in a cellular automata don’t, but this, this one that Conway found really does. And it’s amazing.

[18:26] Frank Lantz: And Go is like that too. Like it’s a particular combination of rules. It doesn’t seem like it would be interesting. It doesn’t seem like there would be anything that it would produce,

[18:34] Frank Lantz: you know, much of an interesting strategic problem. It’s like, okay, you’re placing stones, you’re trying to surround territory, you have this one capture rule. You know, you could easily imagine a world in which you just fill in the board and it’s like, well, the person who went first wins by one point every time.

[18:47] Frank Lantz: It’s like, well, it turns out that that’s not the case.

[18:50] Frank Lantz: Go as this work of culture investigates this really profound idea, which is related to a lot of interesting and hard to understand and important ideas about how systems work and how the world works.

[19:03] Frank Lantz: And looking at the world as a dynamic system unfolds according to constraints and incentives and produces possibilities, spaces that we navigate through. And, and this has ramifications in everything in psychology and in politics and in economics.

[19:21] Frank Lantz: So this is just one simple example of how a game like Go can be meaningful and resonate with the larger world. And it’s not just about creating an entertainment, kind of like a self contained thing that might be hypnotically entertaining but not really have anything to do with bigger issues.

What Go Reveals About Complex Systems

[19:39] Travis: What I end up finding is that as I was first a beginner and started learning the game, you really can’t see much right beyond the rules. There’s just so many layers to it.

[19:48] Travis: But then as you peel back those layers, either through trial and error or through a teacher or whatever it might be, you then start to say, oh, wow, it feels like going through the different situations that come up and go, it almost starts to be instructive to other things that might be happening in these systems that you’ve just talked about.

[20:08] Frank Lantz: I will give you one more example that I think about a lot, which is the relationship between search and heuristics.

[20:15] Frank Lantz: Search.

[20:16] Frank Lantz: One way to do it is to do brute raw search where you just list out all the possible moves and you look at the consequences of each possible move and you see does any of these lead to a win?

[20:29] Frank Lantz: If so, I’m going to pick the one that leads to a win. Heuristics. Now we can’t do that because it’s impractical because the consequences of each move are actually a branching thing that depends on what your opponent is going to do and then what you do after that, and so on and so forth.

[20:43] Frank Lantz: And so you instead you have to have these things called heuristics, which are like rules of thumb. They’re almost like shortcuts through the space of search, which is too large to navigate by itself.

[20:53] Frank Lantz: Shortcuts are things like you want to kind of jump a certain distance. If you have a wall of a certain size and Go, you want to jump out a certain distance from that wall.

[21:01] Frank Lantz: You want to use the strength of that wall to kind of like leap farther, right? You don’t want to play close to your big strong wall. You want to kind of like extend a pretty good distance from your big strong wall.

[21:11] Frank Lantz: Because otherwise you’re. You’re not using the strength you’ve invested in this wall. You want to like get profit from it. You know, the stronger that wall is, the kind of farther you could go when you extend from it, right?

[21:21] Frank Lantz: That’s a heuristic. It’s not always going to be right. It’s not always going to point to the correct move, but it’s like it guides you towards the correct move.

[21:27] Frank Lantz: I think this too is so beautifully illustrated by go. By Go, because of its simplicity is full of these. Like the proverbs of Go are so beautiful and like the ways of learning Go are so much about this.

[21:40] Frank Lantz: And yet you’re never too far away from the tension of wanting to search when you can,

[21:47] Frank Lantz: wanting to like know the absolute ground truth when you can.

[21:52] Frank Lantz: There’s a beautiful section in Lessons in the Fundamentals of Go by Kageyama. Have you ever read this book?

[21:58] Travis: I have, yes. Great book. Yeah.

[22:00] Frank Lantz: So, okay. So yeah, I love this book. One of my favorite all time Go books. I think it’s the best.

[22:05] Frank Lantz: And he talks about when you’re a mid level player and you resist having to read out a ladder and because you want there to be A heuristic. You always want there to be a shortcut.

[22:18] Frank Lantz: I think of this as almost like the Sun Tzu fallacy.

[22:22] Frank Lantz: This idea that a great general is the general that like, has this deep,

[22:27] Frank Lantz: wise insight that somehow captures the essence of a situation and gives him a shortcut to victory.

[22:37] Frank Lantz: When in reality,

[22:38] Frank Lantz: in most situations in life,

[22:41] Frank Lantz: the successful general is the one who woke up a half an hour earlier and ground out the victory by doing the work. Do you know what I mean? A Larry Bird became, you know, this great basketball player not by having some intrinsic gift for putting balls through hoops, but by being paranoid that if he didn’t wake up at 4: 30am and shoot free throws in his,

[23:05] Frank Lantz: in his driveway, that there was somebody else who was going to wake up at 4: 30am he needed to be one half earlier, one half hour earlier than the other guy.

[23:14] Frank Lantz: And that’s what Kageyama says about these lazy players like you and me who don’t want to do the work of reading out the ladders because it’s gross.

[23:24] Frank Lantz: It’s awful that reading out a ladder step by step, black, then white, then black, then white then black. It’s like, kill me,

[23:32] Frank Lantz: shoot me. I don’t want to be in this world where I have to do that. I want to be in the world where I’m like,

[23:38] Frank Lantz: attack at dawn.

[23:40] Frank Lantz: Attack where your enemy is weakest. And just magically you win.

[23:43] Frank Lantz: No, you can’t magically win. And this tension between the kind of brute force work of having to like that underneath wisdom and underneath deep insight and clever heuristics and beautiful proverbs,

[23:59] Frank Lantz: there is always the machinery of step by step working out of a problem.

[24:07] Frank Lantz: That’s such a great lesson, and that’s such a weird real life lesson to be drawn from the game.

[24:13] Travis: That’s so well said. Particularly because of that interplay between intuition and reading. As we know very well in the game of Go and this constant battle of you form intuition when you have done that work right, when you’ve gotten up that half hour earlier, when you’ve put in the time and not been lazy as Kageyama says,

[24:33] Travis: and then you start forming that intuition. But there’s this constant battle where you have to say, okay, my intuition is telling me play this shape because I know it’s good shape.

[24:43] Travis: Or you start to see, oh gosh, this ladder is forming on the board.

[24:47] Travis: But then there are those moments where all of a sudden you say, oh, my intuition, it doesn’t get me far enough. I need to actually read that out. Move by Move.

[24:56] Frank Lantz: This is why they say learn joseki and lose two stones,

[24:59] Frank Lantz: right?

[25:00] Frank Lantz: When you start learning joseki, you actually get worse for a little bit.

[25:03] Frank Lantz: Because when you’re, before you learn joseki, you’re just reading out the corners. Every time you play,

[25:07] Frank Lantz: then you learn joseki and you’re like, oh, I’m supposed to go here, I’m supposed to go here, I’m supposed to go here. But you haven’t, you don’t know why. Like, so you’re doing these moves that you don’t really and.

[25:16] Frank Lantz: But you have to kind of do it. Intuition is good. Like, intuition is the thing I love. Like, intuition is like, I truly do believe in the value and the power of like, the way that we leapfrog from doing the kind of grueling work of step by step search to these flights of creativity and imagination that allow us to kind of like,

[25:36] Frank Lantz: as humans, like, do the thing that humans do. But I’m always reminded of the fact that you don’t want to, you don’t want to fantasize that we’re not all ultimately made of atoms.

[25:46] Frank Lantz: We are, we don’t want to, you know what, you know, you don’t, you don’t want to live in a kind of idealistic fantasy world where you forget the fact that under the hood, you know, it’s all rocks and rules.

[25:57] Frank Lantz: I don’t know if you are old enough to remember.

[26:00] Frank Lantz: Before AlphaGo, there was a lot of people who thought, oh sure, obviously chess, obviously Deep Blue is going to be good at chess, Computer is going to be good at chess.

[26:09] Frank Lantz: But Go,

[26:11] Frank Lantz: because it requires this deep intuition, it’s so large, it requires these, this intuitive,

[26:18] Frank Lantz: creative kind of Go is going to, not going to fall for another,

[26:21] Frank Lantz: you know, few decades at least. And then like a year later, you know, AlphaGo came out.

AlphaGo and the Broader AI Story

[26:26] Travis: That’s how I first learned about you, was through your role in the AlphaGo documentary, which I’m sure you’ve gotten quite a bit.

[26:33] Travis: And you described not only the basic rules and principles in that documentary, but also what made Go so challenging, right, for AI systems to conquer up to that point in time.

[26:45] Travis: How do you think about the success of AlphaGo being one of the top players in the broader narrative of artificial intelligence, making these significant advances and becoming a technology that dramatically changes how people function in the world?

[27:04] Travis: How do you look at that?

[27:06] Frank Lantz: I think it’s understanding that Go is a cultural form, that it is in some ways like an art form,

[27:13] Frank Lantz: work like a symphony or piece of music or something like that.

[27:16] Frank Lantz: It’s Interesting when you put that in context of this recent explosion of AI, this powerful new transformer models and neural nets. And how surprising that the first thing that they seem to be so good at is not math and logic, but it’s just like, pictures and language, like poetry and,

[27:36] Frank Lantz: you know, aping different styles of literature and writing. It’s like, whoa,

[27:41] Frank Lantz: that’s weird.

[27:42] Frank Lantz: And yet, if you think about Go itself as it’s like an artwork, on the one hand, Go is nothing but logic. All it is the precise logic of explicitly following these rules and an objective truth about whether a position is won or lost.

[27:58] Frank Lantz: I mean, there’s nothing there but logic. But it is the art form of logic, right? It is logic not applied in order to get better crops or to, like, resolve a political problem or something.

[28:12] Frank Lantz: Like, it’s logic applied for its own sake. So in a weird way,

[28:16] Frank Lantz: AI has always, you know, even in the domains where it was like, going, like,

[28:21] Frank Lantz: 10 years ago,

[28:22] Frank Lantz: having these amazing breakthroughs, there was also, like, an aesthetic element to it. So I think that’s one thing that’s interesting, that kind of no one has pointed out before.

[28:29] Frank Lantz: I also think that it’s really instructive to look at what’s happening with chess right now. Chess is off the hook. Chess is so thriving right now. I don’t even like chess.

[28:41] Frank Lantz: And I watch chess.

[28:43] Travis: Me too.

[28:44] Frank Lantz: Exciting. It’s.

[28:45] Travis: Yeah.

[28:45] Frank Lantz: You know what I’m saying? Yes, it’s fun. I watch GothamChess, and I. My friends will be like, oh, you’re watching the. The world Championship or whatever the. And it’s like.

[28:52] Frank Lantz: It’s like, oh, I want to go watch. And you follow along.

[28:55] Frank Lantz: And you would think that after Deep Blue, one of the things that you might have expected is for chess to fall into disuse, you know, that people would be like, ah, I guess that’s not that interesting anymore.

[29:06] Frank Lantz: But it turns out, no, it’s actually fine.

[29:08] Frank Lantz: And chess is every. Chess is, like, blowing up, and people love it. And the way that AI has been incorporated into modern chess as a tool for analyzing and understanding games, no one cares whether Magnus Carlsen can beat Stockfish.

[29:25] Frank Lantz: We know he can’t, and we don’t care.

[29:27] Frank Lantz: No one is interested in watching Magnus Carlsen play Stockfish. We’d rather watch Stockfish play Leela. But even that is like a gimmick. Watching Stockfish play Leela is only interesting,

[29:37] Frank Lantz: you know, occasionally.

[29:39] Frank Lantz: Mostly we have the engines as one of the lenses we can apply to a board position in order to understand it. We can say, well, this is what the engine, how the engine evaluates this, but, like, understanding it through that lens,

[29:53] Frank Lantz: we understand that that isn’t the whole story, because chess that we’re interested in is human chess between human players. And that’s still really interesting. In the same way that we love to watch track and field, we know you can make a robot that can run 10 times faster than Usain Bolt.

[30:08] Frank Lantz: Who cares? Like, that’s not the point. The point is not how fast can you go in some abstract sense. The point is how fast can you go, you personally? And so it turns out that this doesn’t have to be the end of chess.

[30:19] Frank Lantz: And the fact that Go continues to limp along in America and in the west as the kind of poor cousin to chess is, has nothing to do with AI.

[30:30] Frank Lantz: Whatever it is that has prevented Go from, like, really taking off and becoming as popular as chess is still there.

[30:38] Frank Lantz: Just now, before we started this afternoon,

[30:41] Frank Lantz: I just went and looked up on Google. I was like, who’s the current world champion of Go?

[30:47] Frank Lantz: And it’s like, if you look up who is the Go world champion, you know what you get? You get articles about Lee Sedol and AlphaGo, right? From eight years ago, like, talking about, like, oh, eight years later, what’s going on?

[30:59] Frank Lantz: No, no, no, no. I was like, what’s happening right now with go? So eventually I typed in current Go world champion, and eventually I got, yeah, so these are the people.

[31:08] Frank Lantz: But it’s like,

[31:09] Frank Lantz: why isn’t there just a coherent sense of go?

[31:13] Frank Lantz: It’s so much better than chess in some ways. I don’t think that it’s that much harder to watch and to understand. I think in some ways Go is easier to watch and understand because, like, if you look at a chess position,

[31:25] Frank Lantz: a novice looking at a chess position has no clue.

[31:29] Frank Lantz: But if you look at a Go position,

[31:32] Frank Lantz: even a novice can say, whoa,

[31:35] Frank Lantz: white has a lot of territory. You know what I mean? Like,

[31:38] Frank Lantz: go, I think, is so visual, and it’s so much, in a way easier to see the ebb and flow of the shapes of the board. And you can see, oh, it’s about surrounding territory.

[31:48] Frank Lantz: And there you go, there’s the territory, and you can count it up, and you can see. And then a fight happens, and you can. It’s, like, so exciting and dramatic.

[31:56] Frank Lantz: I don’t know why.

[31:57] Frank Lantz: When I was invited to speak at the US Go Congress, I mean, you. You saw that I was basically like, I don’t know, like,

[32:05] Frank Lantz: maybe try to make it a little more exciting and dramatic. But, like, mostly it’s not coherent.

[32:12] Frank Lantz: Like, one of the things that makes me interested in chess is the fact, like as bad as FIDE is or whatever, the chess thing is,

[32:20] Frank Lantz: as bad as it is. And I think, and I understand that it’s terrible, but as bad as it is, there is one world champion.

[32:26] Frank Lantz: And like even the fact that the current world champion isn’t the best, you know, at chess, it’s like it’s still fine. Like I’m still interested in this tournament. There’s a clear single thing to pay attention to that’s like the super bowl, it’s like the World Series, it’s like whatever,

[32:41] Frank Lantz: the Stanley Cup.

[32:42] Travis: Right.

[32:43] Frank Lantz: And so I don’t think Go has that and I think it suffers from that because I think there’s a trickle down effect.

[32:49] Frank Lantz: We should have a single. Whether it’s Shin Jin-seo, I don’t know who it is.

[32:52] Travis: Yeah, he’s the, he’s the top right now.

[32:55] Frank Lantz: Yeah. This guy should be feted. Like he should be a celebrity. Like they should throw more money at him. You know, he should be having like bottle service and there should be scandals and.

[33:06] Frank Lantz: Do you know what I mean? Like, and yet somehow, like, I’ve never heard of this guy. Even though I’m a casual, you know, fan. And I watch, when I watch Go currently,

[33:14] Frank Lantz: it’s things like Nick Sibicky. Do you know Nick Sibicky?

[33:17] Travis: Yes, yes.

[33:18] Frank Lantz: Yeah. Well, he. Yeah, he’s great.

[33:21] Frank Lantz: Like, I recently wrote about KataGo and the adversarial policies, which I think is really interesting in terms of AI and go.

[33:27] Frank Lantz: And Nick Sibicky did such a good job of explaining that, and he played it out himself. And then like a month or two ago, Nick was like, you know what?

[33:35] Frank Lantz: I’m going to stop making Go content because I just, it’s just not worth it. I can’t make it. I can’t make a living from doing this.

[33:42] Frank Lantz: We’re never going to solve this problem if people like Nick Sibicky can’t make a living.

[33:46] Frank Lantz: If he can’t do at least as well as GothamChess does.

[33:50] Travis: Right.

[33:51] Frank Lantz: I mean, there’s multiple people who make livings making chess content, but there’s basically no one,

[33:55] Frank Lantz: no one who does it for go. And there’s no reason that should be the case. Go, I think, is intrinsically fun to watch, easier to understand than chess, and deeper and more beautiful and more interesting and harder and smarter.

[34:11] Frank Lantz: And we can figure out a way to use the AI to give people a window into the game and figure out a way to kind of lavish a Little bit more attention and celebrity and money and fame and clout on our go playing humans.

AI Blind Spots and Adversarial Go

[34:31] Travis: Yeah, and I love that, Frank, because you’ve literally been taking the words out of my mouth as I’ve been. Which is exactly how. How I really, you know, this is. That’s the ideal.

[34:39] Travis: So Your article In 2023, the afterlife of Go, right, talking about, in response to the Wired article saying, hey,

[34:46] Travis: AI crushed, you know, the top player back in 2016. Therefore, that’s a representation of AI taking away white collar or intellectual work.

[34:55] Travis: You kind of go on to say, well,

[34:56] Travis: no, that’s not quite the same. Right, because games are different than doing a job.

[35:02] Travis: And so you then go into a few different things. You talk about this adversarial AI, which effectively was discovered that there was a sort of blind spot that if you played against an AI, even though that AI system is multiple ranks better than the best player, I mean, it’s superhuman.

[35:19] Frank Lantz: It’s beyond superhuman.

[35:21] Travis: Even though that happened, you said, you know, quote, it took seven years to discover that this thing we thought was a God had no idea what it was doing. And so this concept of, okay, we have these models and algorithms and language models for learning all this and doing much better than the best human player could do,

[35:41] Travis: it doesn’t mean that it’s actually understanding things and using the adversarial A. I. figured that out. Right.

[35:48] Frank Lantz: It’s so weird. And I think people still haven’t really sufficiently groked what this means.

[35:56] Frank Lantz: I love it. I think it’s so interesting because this is the result of people making an effort. It’s not like they just stumbled across this. They’re like, we’re going to use AI to see if we can like poke holes in AI in AlphaGo, AlphaZero, or.

[36:10] Frank Lantz: Because KataGo is just the most recent version of the same basic process that produced AlphaZero. And the first thing that they discovered was just this little glitch in the counting in the end game where you’re counting and passing, counting and passing.

[36:25] Frank Lantz: And there was like a little weakness there where the AI would pass when it shouldn’t and.

[36:33] Frank Lantz: And you could exploit that to beat it. And I thought, well, this is stupid. That’s just something about the etiquette of like, passing out.

[36:42] Frank Lantz: The AI is clearly won and you’re just, you know, you’re just pointing out the fact that it’s of, like, how to count at the end of the game. It’s like, **** that.

[36:51] Frank Lantz: That’s not a genuine, you know, insight.

[36:53] Frank Lantz: But then these same guys kept working Kept grinding away and kept like using AIs to try to beat, you know, not to get good at Go, but just to beat AlphaGo, right?

[37:03] Frank Lantz: And eventually they found this thing, which isn’t just a gimmick. It is something deep in the heart of how AI sees the board.

[37:15] Frank Lantz: And it, as a result,

[37:17] Frank Lantz: is a method that you and me,

[37:21] Frank Lantz: plunkers, guys who are not, I assume you’re not a world-class Go player.

[37:25] Travis: Guilty as charged, Frank. Yeah. Okay, good.

[37:27] Frank Lantz: Yeah, but you can beat AlphaZero. You could beat AlphaGo. You can beat KataGo, which is the state of the art version of the best superhuman Go AI by using this dumb trick.

[37:37] Frank Lantz: And that to me is like so weird and interesting and I think just another great example of how complex these things are. Even once we think, oh, the story’s over because we had, we had AlphaGo and it’s this superhuman Go AI and now it’s better than humans and always will be.

[37:57] Frank Lantz: And now we can like move on to the next chapter. And then like eight years later, this guy’s like, no, actually, the story’s more complicated. There’s like this weird back door.

[38:06] Frank Lantz: And you might think, oh, it’s easy to fix that back door. It’s actually not easy to fix that. The backdoor. The people who run,

[38:11] Frank Lantz: you know, KataGo are working on it and maybe they’ll fix it. But then maybe are there other backdoors that we could also find? You know what I mean?

[38:19] Frank Lantz: So there’s something delightful about the fact that even now, when we think the story’s over, the story keeps going. Go still has more mysteries left for us to solve.

[38:29] Travis: The fact that it was missed and was also a product of the fact that it rarely came up because that just wasn’t happening at a high level of play.

[38:39] Travis: Whereas like you said, you or myself, where we’re novice players, we could pick that out easily. And so the world of Go has actually fully embraced the use of AI.

[38:49] Travis: Just like chess has, both pros use it.

[38:52] Travis: I use it to a limited degree because it’s only helpful once you get to a certain level,

[38:57] Travis: but it’s there.

[38:58] Travis: And then at the same time, if you look at that and you say, wow, it took seven years and actually using AI to find that mistake. But it was a pretty simple one, it was a pretty obvious one.

[39:12] Travis: How do you then tie that back to the implications, right, that arise from using AI in society, maybe in games, in video gaming and those sorts of things? How do you think that plays out?

[39:27] Frank Lantz: I think it’s a demonstration that we are in some ways,

[39:32] Frank Lantz: even though we are in this golden age of very powerful, these new techniques of AI, which are very powerful and very impressive and I think are world changing. I genuinely, I’m not a skeptic, I’m.

[39:42] Frank Lantz: I truly think that it’s amazing to be alive during this time of these transformer models and these huge neural nets and machine learning. And I think they’re amazing.

[39:51] Frank Lantz: But the story’s not over. And I think in some ways we’re in a little bit of an uncanny valley between things that are systems that are superhuman at completing a task within a well defined domain and have no concept of, like, what it is they’re actually doing.

[40:12] Travis: I mean, to your point, it’s correlation based, right? It’s just saying if these two things happen together, I’m going to try to mimic that through a lot of data. But it doesn’t imply understanding, is that what you’re saying?

[40:22] Frank Lantz: I guess really what I’m saying, and I’m not saying that just correlation can’t get you there. Maybe we’re just correlating,

[40:27] Frank Lantz: you know, I’m not, I don’t know,

[40:30] Frank Lantz: but I’m not saying a correlation can’t get you there. I’m saying that this is revealing something about what we mean by understanding itself. Like this is showing us as a kind of test case or a concrete example, an object lesson.

[40:45] Frank Lantz: When we say,

[40:46] Frank Lantz: what does it mean to understand something?

[40:48] Frank Lantz: What does it mean to be good at Go?

[40:50] Frank Lantz: Right, on the one hand,

[40:52] Frank Lantz: what does it mean to be good at Go? Well, I point at AlphaGo or KataGo, the most recent version. I say, well, that’s it, that’s the, that’s the gold standard of what it means to be good at Go.

[41:01] Frank Lantz: Oh, really? But I can beat it. Me, a person who barely knows the rules of Go and I’m an idiot. I can beat it. I’m like, oh, well,

[41:09] Frank Lantz: yeah, but that’s just kind of a. Yeah, you know, that’s a problem, that’s a limitation.

[41:14] Frank Lantz: Oh, really? So being good at Go doesn’t mean, like, you can’t beat, like. Yeah, so really being good at Go.

[41:19] Frank Lantz: Well, what does it mean? Well,

[41:22] Frank Lantz: to really be good at Go,

[41:24] Frank Lantz: you kind of need to know that you’re playing Go.

[41:27] Frank Lantz: You kind of have to be able to be aware of the fact that you’re playing Go and you’re either winning or losing.

[41:33] Frank Lantz: And sure, you might have all this,

[41:36] Frank Lantz: you might have gone through all this training and all this learning and come up with this strategy,

[41:41] Frank Lantz: but if you. And you’re applying this strategy. Maybe this strategy is superhuman. But if you’re not aware of the fact that you’re getting beaten by a smart six year old,

[41:52] Frank Lantz: then like, what is it? Like, are you really good at Go at that point? Like good at something,

[41:58] Frank Lantz: but you’re kind of not good at Go. I think I’ll take. My money’s on the smart six year old at this point, you know what I mean?

[42:04] Frank Lantz: What Does a Smart 6 year old have that that AlphaGo doesn’t? Well, the Smart 6 year old is aware that it’s playing a game.

[42:10] Frank Lantz: Like it knows what a game is. A game is something you do and you win or lose and you do it for fun or to show off,

[42:20] Frank Lantz: or because your parents told you, or you know, because your friends are doing it and you want to be cool or you, you know, you have some reason for doing it and you do it and you either win or loss.

[42:29] Frank Lantz: And then it feels good to win and you try to get better. And so you get better and you like. Does that produce the kind of superhuman strategy that AlphaGo represents?

[42:41] Frank Lantz: No,

[42:42] Frank Lantz: I mean, not directly necessarily, but what it does produce is something that’s more robust,

[42:48] Frank Lantz: it’s messier,

[42:50] Frank Lantz: because it’s like, look, I’m gonna learn Go, but I’m also, I’m also gonna do this other stuff because this other stuff that I’m learning about being cool with my friends and doing homework and like going to the library and using the Internet,

[43:06] Frank Lantz: writing software and all this other stuff. It’s like Go exists alongside all of this other stuff as a thing in the world that I do. But that’s what allows me to see that Go is a game that I’m playing and that I’m either winning or losing it.

[43:21] Frank Lantz: In some ways you have to diminish the scope of Go in your system in order for your system to be robust enough that it’s not going to be endlessly exploitable because it’s idiotically trapped inside of Go.

[43:37] Frank Lantz: So the way that the team that makes KataGo is going to fix KataGo is that they’ll go back to the lab and they’ll look at the algorithms and they’ll look at the training data and they’ll rerun it and they’ll test it and they’ll do this other stuff and eventually they’ll iron out this particular glitch.

[43:52] Frank Lantz: And meanwhile Tony Wang and his crew of exploiters are going to be looking for other,

[43:57] Frank Lantz: other adversarial policies and that’s going to go on.

[44:00] Frank Lantz: And these people who are Doing this.

[44:03] Frank Lantz: What motivates them?

[44:05] Frank Lantz: Do you know what I mean? The thing that motivates them is like, hard to pin down. They want to get a PhD, they want to get money, they want to get a girlfriend, they want to have their parents be proud of them, they want to get, you know, they want to get rich,

[44:18] Frank Lantz: they want to get hired by Google. Yeah, it’s like, so it’s messy. It’s messy. Being good at Go means understanding that Go is a thing in the world.

[44:28] Frank Lantz: And so it’s weird, that’s the uncanny valley that we’re in. Because what AlphaGo represents is just like Go itself in a certain kind of lens into Go itself. Like what is the optimal strategy in a sense, but it’s not really,

[44:41] Frank Lantz: it’s not a thing that is playing Go. It’s just a certain set of facts about what the best moves are under certain conditions.

[44:49] Frank Lantz: And it has these like, strange artifacts in it, like these exploitable weaknesses,

[44:56] Frank Lantz: because,

[44:57] Frank Lantz: you know, it’s not this messy, robust,

[45:00] Frank Lantz: complicated thing. So I don’t know how to extrapolate this to give you a neat lesson.

[45:05] Frank Lantz: I do think that we are at a time when this particular issue about the next step in AI being about being an agent in the world,

[45:16] Frank Lantz: being embodied in a sense, and having all the messiness of the large language models, which are kind of annoying that they’re so messy. They’re not pristine, they’re not clean, they’re not crystal clear the way AlphaGo was crystal clear and pristine and perfect.

[45:33] Frank Lantz: The large language models are messy. Are they people? Sort of. Are they proto people? Do they have opinions?

[45:38] Frank Lantz: Are they. Sometimes they seem angry at me, sometimes they seem like they’re desperately trying to please me and they’re kowtowing. It’s weird.

[45:47] Frank Lantz: But that weirdness is the world that we’re in. We’re not gonna.

[45:51] Frank Lantz: We’re not going to magically get back to the clean, perfect precision of AlphaGo. And these adversarial policies are the first clear indication of that.

[46:03] Frank Lantz: I think there’s a profound implication for the future of AI,

[46:07] Frank Lantz: and I think very few people are really pulling at this thread yet. But I think,

[46:12] Frank Lantz: you mark my words,

[46:13] Frank Lantz: this is the thread that’s going to get yanked.

Can Go Flourish in American Culture?

[46:17] Travis: And I have one final question because I do want to be thoughtful on your time, which is 10 years on from when you were at the Go Congress and you were talking about some ways that you already articulated around how to try to make Go more popular in the west,

[46:29] Travis: in America. We see that 10 years on it is, unfortunately, it’s limping along, at least in America. Hopefully that changes. But how do you feel about the game’s chances to flourish here from the perspective of American culture, meaning one that is increasingly focused on clickbait, on social media,

[46:51] Travis: on sort of the instantly gratifying sound bites. Are these things an obstacle to having people be more interested in Go in America, or do you think it’s actually something that could help it?

[47:02] Frank Lantz: I remain an optimist, and I’ll tell you why. Because of bridge and League of Legends. These are two examples of. Have you ever played bridge?

[47:13] Travis: I know of bridge, but if you could help us just quickly.

[47:16] Frank Lantz: Bridge is the card game. It’s a bidding card game. You bid and then they take tricks, and it’s a partnership game. It’s you and your partner against a team of other two other people, and you’re bidding and you’re taking tricks and you win or lose and you’re scoring points.

[47:28] Frank Lantz: Bridge is the go of card games. I’m obsessed with bridge. I don’t play. I’m not smart enough to play bridge. I watch bridge. I try to learn it once, and it was too hard.

[47:36] Frank Lantz: And then. So now my wife and I, we watch Bridge on YouTube and we’re like, oh, my God, one day we’ll learn bridge.

[47:42] Travis: Why am I just watching this and not playing it? No.

[47:44] Frank Lantz: Bridge is so complicated and so nuanced and so strategically thorny and deep. And it’s full of all these things where you have to, like, hypothesize about conditionals and you have to look at alternate ways that the world could be.

[48:02] Frank Lantz: And you’re like. It’s like everything that’s complicated about chess and everything that’s complicated about poker combined,

[48:08] Frank Lantz: and there’s nothing to it except this hard,

[48:11] Frank Lantz: impossible,

[48:13] Frank Lantz: cerebral problem solving.

[48:16] Frank Lantz: Deep, deep, strategic problem solving.

[48:19] Frank Lantz: And bridge for a long time was more popular than Taylor Swift in America. Bridge was a huge phenomenon, Enormously popular across a broad. Like, just like mainstream human human beings, they just played it for fun.

[48:36] Frank Lantz: And. And. And to a certain degree, League of Legends, I think, is like, kids nowadays, they grow up, they play League of Legends. That’s it. Like, if you’re a kid, it’s like baseball used to be, right?

[48:43] Frank Lantz: You don’t have to like it, but you. Basically, everyone plays it. And League of Legends is kind of the same thing. If you try to learn League of Legends, there’s no.

[48:50] Frank Lantz: It’s not fun.

[48:51] Frank Lantz: There’s no fun.

[48:52] Frank Lantz: It’s just this endless process of losing and learning, and it’s grueling and it’s like so complicated and confusing and hard and brutal and difficult and challenging and rich and complex and strategic.

[49:09] Frank Lantz: Right? And again, is this really hard, like strategic problem solving thing.

[49:14] Frank Lantz: And those demonstrate that it’s not always just a race to the bottom,

[49:19] Frank Lantz: that there is an appetite in culture, in American culture, in late capitalist America,

[49:27] Frank Lantz: right? Of the. Where we all are addicted to our phones and we’re all like,

[49:33] Frank Lantz: you know,

[49:34] Frank Lantz: being exploited by social media and whatever and whatnot. There is still a hunger for things that are complex and deep and beautiful and reward effort and give you an opportunity to get better by digging deep and having self control and learning and self improvement and self overcoming and being a better person and collaborating with other people and sharing this complex,

[50:09] Frank Lantz: rich language of ideas and problems and experiences.

[50:15] Frank Lantz: It’s still there.

[50:17] Frank Lantz: And I’m a believer that Go could be a game that could come back and flourish,

[50:23] Frank Lantz: that bridge could come back and flourish, and that there are new games that will emerge that satisfy that appetite because it’s happened before and things that happen can happen again.

[50:37] Travis: Frank, this has been a great period of time. I appreciate your thoughts and your insights. I could probably ask you about a million more questions, but again, thank you so much.

[50:45] Frank Lantz: I appreciate it. It’s been a wonderful conversation. Thank you.

Closing

[50:51] Travis: That concludes my conversation with Frank Lantz. Thanks so much for listening and I hope you join us next time. Take care.